The importance and value of secure data storage is ever increasing. For example, data may be stored that is sensitive to one or more users, such as confidential business information (e.g., business ledgers, contact lists), personally identifiable information (e.g., full legal name, social security number, birthday), financial information (e.g., banking account numbers, billing addresses), and so on. Consequently, as the value of this data increases so does the motivation for malicious parties to gain unauthorized access to this data.
Encryption and decryption techniques were developed to protect data. These techniques typically use a “key” to encrypt or decrypt data using one or more algorithms. For example, data encrypted with a particular key may then be accessed using the same key (e.g., using symmetrical encryption/decryption techniques) or a different key (e.g., using asymmetrical techniques that use a private key/public key pair).
Use of some traditional encryption techniques, however, may cause the key to be exposed, which may enable a malicious party to gain unauthorized access to the encrypted data. Additionally, as previously described, because the value of the data that is protected is ever increasing, so too is the sophistication of techniques employed by malicious parties to gain access to the data. Therefore, traditional techniques that do not address the increasing sophistication of malicious parties may result in exposure of the data.